'In short I was afraid'

     Cobalt is a key component in lithium batteries. More than half of the world’s cobalt supply is mined in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Which means there’s a good chance the battery in the phone in your back pocket contains cobalt from ore dug with a pickaxe by a 10 year old earning a dollar a day working in a mine in Congo. Or the electric car that you felt such moral purity buying as your blow against global warming also helped underwrite a system where Chinese metal conglomerates exploit a trouble-ridden African nation.
     I learned this reading “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives” by Siddharth Kara, in preparation for a two-week visit to Congo next month, guest of the Canadian international advocacy group, Journalists for Human Rights.
     The plan was to go and train journalists there. They speak French — Kinshasa is the largest French-speaking city in the world with a million more residents than the Paris metro area. I took French for a year in 7th grade. Translation would be provided by the former editor of this newspaper, Michael Cooke, who is board chair of the JHR, which also explains how they came to invite me.
     We’d go together, visit schools, maybe take in a refugee camp: some 6 million people have been displaced by violence in Congo.
     We talked about this trip for more than a year. Recently a date was set at the end of May and the proper journalistic credential acquired. Last Wednesday I had a fruitful conversation with the JHR’s international program manager. We discussed some of the stories I’m interested in covering. Moved by Kara’s book, I wanted to visit cobalt mines.

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Rushing to face death, then telling the tale

     This is the latest in a series celebrating the role the Sun-Times plays on its 75th anniversary. Jesse Howe created a dramatic online graphic version of this story that explodes that first paragraph against a backdrop of images. It also represents a shift, at least for me, in thinking. I thought Howe was developing a "slide show" — a graphic presentation to accompany the story. But I see now what he's done IS the story, with a way-cool interactive presentation. There is no other publication of the piece, except I suppose the top here. You're free to draw your own conclusion, but I like it. It's vivid. 

     A CTA streetcar collides with a gasoline truck. A Catholic elementary school turns into an inferno. An Illinois Central rush-hour express train slams into a packed local commuter train. An American Airlines DC-10 loses an engine while taking off from O’Hare and explodes into the ground. One L train hits another and tumbles off the elevated tracks.

     For 75 years, Sun-Times reporters and photographers have been hard on the heels of first responders at tragedies great and small. Some are seared into the collective memory of the city. Most are quickly forgotten, except of course by the survivors who lived through them and the journalists who gathered their stories. 

     One thing that leaps out is the access that newspapers once automatically received. After a CTA Green Hornet streetcar hit a gasoline truck at 63rd and State on May 25, 1950, trapping 34 people who burned alive in the “Death Trolley,” the Sun-Times ran photos of dazed survivors taken at hospitals, of investigators going over charred possessions of victims, of relatives prostrate with grief after identifying their loved ones at the city morgue.
     In 1958, the Sun-Times and Chicago’s three other major daily newspapers were supplied with spot news by the famed City News Bureau, whose Charles Remsberg — a 22-year-old intern who’d graduated from Medill that June — was at Traffic Court on the afternoon of Dec. 1 when his desk told him to hurry over to Humboldt Park, to Our Lady of the Angels School.
     “I ran around to the front of the school,” Remsberg wrote to his parents the next day. “The north side of the building looked like a cereal box in an incinerator. Smoke was pouring out of every window, casting a light fog over the ground area and a dense pall above. At the back of the wing, flames still were leaping up. Police were struggling to keep a huge crowd of adults and children back of the fire lines. After getting a good overall picture of the scene, I headed for the phone. Women in the crowd were hysterical, their faces twisted and wet with tears. Men were holding them back, but they were screaming, ‘Where are they? Where are they?’”

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Works in progress: Willie Weinbaum

     A surprising number of people I know from college ended up doing exactly what they wanted to do in life. There is Robert Leighton, who drew cartoons for the Daily Northwestern and now draws cartoons for The New Yorker. There is Steve Albini, musical iconoclast then and now. There's Cate Plys, who never stopped writing across a spectrum of genres and publications. Not to forget myself. And then there is Willie Weinbaum, who ... well, maybe it's better if I let him explain it. Take it away, Willie:

     I admit it, Neil. 

      Like you, I’m 62, and yes, we’re dinosaurs who cranked out stories on manual typewriters and got them back from instructors with mistakes circled and annotated in red ink (at least I did) as Class of ’82 undergrads at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. 

     The internet and Google, high def and hard drives, cell phones and social media, podcasts, zooms and a helluva lot more of today’s reporting and communications tools were well beyond the horizon and my (our?) imagination, but the principles and practices impressed upon us are not outdated. 

     And like you, I often draw upon those teachings about open-mindedness, truth and fairness, ethics and compassion. As a TV producer and digital journalist for ESPN — the cable network that debuted in September 1979 as we started our sophomore year — I also have a deep appreciation of the power of teamwork, something we experienced and learned about less than a decade after Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate revelations.

     Over the last year, I’ve been privileged to participate in three in-depth group projects and none of them would have come to fruition without constant collaboration and cooperation. It might seem trite for someone to tout teamwork when covering sports, but the games, wins and losses are not what our unit’s pursuits are about.  

Willie Weinbaum (Jon Hayt/ESPN Images)

     Most recently, I was a producer/reporter with Nicole Noren and T.J. Quinn for “LISTEN,” an investigative documentary that premiered last month and remains on ESPN+ (and ESPN+ on Hulu) about the 2018 murder of track and field athlete Lauren McCluskey. Despite the University of Utah senior’s pleas for help, people and institutions repeatedly failed to listen and protect her from a man she had dated until finding out he was a violent felon on parole who had lied to her about his identity and age.

      In November, reporting colleagues Dan Murphy, John Mastroberardino and I finished a text story about the “Redskins” name and mascot that’s been eliminated from the NFL and from college teams, but is still found at lower levels: “Washington finally shed the name, but 37 high schools haven’t.” 

     And I was a co-director/producer last year with Jeff Ausiello and Lauren Stowell on “Jackie to Me,” a multi-platform series for the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the Major League Baseball color barrier.  Among the many memorable opportunities for me was a two-day trip to Chicago and New Orleans to interview Rev. Jesse Jackson and Ruby Bridges about their perspectives on Robinson’s civil rights legacy.

    Sharing challenges like going after and preparing for big “gets” and figuring out how to best tell stories — and even commiserating about disappointments — are among the rewarding aspects of what we get to do together. And I haven’t even mentioned the invaluable roles of each assignment’s editor, photographer, sound person, animator and other contributors.

    I still think of myself as a work in progress, just as I did in school. Learning on the job each day has made 28 years at ESPN and 11 before that at Major League Baseball Productions and Sports Newsatellite fly by. 

    Although for years I’ve been working mostly on subjects like safety and justice, I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to cover a game and go in the locker room where you’ll hear a classic line once in a while. 

   One that stands out from my time at Northwestern was when I was in the graduate journalism program in 1982 and the Wildcats had recently beaten Northern Illinois to end a Division I-record 34-game football losing streak (NU was 1-42-1 during our four years as undergraduates). 

      Northwestern then beat Minnesota in Evanston, for the home team’s first Big Ten victory in five years, so I asked Golden Gophers coach Joe Salem what the NU win meant for the conference. 

     He said, “It means we stink.” 

‘Life’s gone by’

             Kareem Bandealy, left, stars with Kate Fry in "The Cherry Orchard"
                    (Liz Lauren/Goodman Theatre)

     “Just another production ...” Robert Falls lied Monday night, in front of friends, colleagues and family at the dinner in his honor before opening night of “The Cherry Orchard,” his last play in 36 years as artistic director at the Goodman Theatre.
     OK, “lied” is strong — overly dramatic, if you will. I can’t see into his heart. Falls, no doubt, did approach the Anton Chekhov classic, as he claims, with professional aplomb, as the most recent of the countless theatrical endeavors he guided over the nearly half-century that he has blazed as the brightest star on Chicago’s theatrical scene.
     But forgive me if I insist that the man who pulled the pin on Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” in 2018 to resist Donald Trump steamrolling American life didn’t just shrug, close his eyes and pick “The Cherry Orchard” because his finger stopped its blind dance over the Cs on his bookshelf. This is a puzzle box; there are messages hidden here.
     “Life’s gone by,” says Firs, the aged peasant. “It’s like I never lived it. All gone now.”
OK, maybe not so hidden. Chekhov labeled his last play, written as he was dying, a “comedy.” Falls certainly provides farce aplenty, with Yepikhodov’s pratfalls and squeaky boots. Still, that’s passing comic relief in a play that includes a dead child, coldly spurned romantic gestures and a theme of facing the debts of the past that seem more 2023 than 1904.
     “Can’t you hear the voices of all those dead souls bought and sold by your family?” Trofimov, the “mangy moth-eaten student” demands of the maudlin aristocracy. “You’ve all been corrupted by it. ... If we want to live in the present, we have to atone for our past and break with it.”
     But breaking with the past can hurt. While hesitating to summarize the plot of a Russian play — the names tend to blend together — I think I can get away with saying when “The Cherry Orchard” opens, the aristocratic family is bankrupt and their estate is about to be sold. Lyubov, the grandiose matron of the family, and her entourage have returned from her self-imposed exile in Paris, where she has blown through the last of the money.

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Flashback 1993: "People screamed for help, clinging to ledges"

Sun-Times file photo

      This Sunday the Sun-Times is running the latest in my periodic series on the paper's 75th anniversary. It's how we covered fires and disasters, and touches upon the Paxton Hotel fire, 30 years ago last month. This is the story I wrote from the scene.

     There were faces at every window. 

     When Tower Ladder No. 10 pulled up to the raging fire at the Paxton Hotel just after 4 a.m. Tuesday, firefighters at first couldn't take the time to try to fight the fire. The windows of the Paxton were filled with people, screaming for help. Some were clinging to the ledges. 

      "We used the tower ladder basket, just scraped along the side of the building, took the people in, then brought them in and laid them down on the ground and went back up for more," said Raymond Hoff, the company captain. 

     In order to set up their ladders, firefighters had to step over the bodies of those who had already jumped. One man knotted several sheets together and lowered himself down, falling the last few feet and hurting his elbow. Some first threw mattresses out in an attempt to break their falls. 

     Many were hurt critically, including 22-year-old Leslie Matthews, who jumped from an upper floor with her 4-month-old baby, Jalesa, cradled in her arms. The baby was not hurt. 

     Firefighters raced to cut the burglar bars that trapped some residents in ground-floor apartments. Del Clark, a longtime Chicago radio newscaster, was trapped in his apartment at the back of the hotel. He sat at his barred window, shouting to the firefighters, but they couldn't hear him over the noise. Finally he thrust his arms through the bars and, waving them frantically, caught the attention of firefighters, and was saved. 

      The uninjured who were displaced by the fire — some naked, others weeping, some without shoes, others in their underwear — were comforted by Red Cross workers, who guided them to an out-of-service CTA bus, pressed into duty as a temporary shelter. 

      "I was supposed to move in two weeks," said resident Terry Zeszut, 46, who lost everything he owned. "I have to call the movers and cancel." 

      Zeszut was among several residents who simply stood on the sidewalk, grimacing in the early morning cold and drizzle, wrapped in thin blue Red Cross blankets, watching. Many of the 130 residents of the hotel were elderly, some wheelchair-bound, and they stared out from behind oxygen masks, dazed and wide-eyed with shock. 

      From across the street, they were viewed by the well-heeled residents of area condominiums, along with early-morning dog-walkers, who stepped out of their buildings to watch the fire. High winds stoked the fire, forcing it through the roof, which pancaked onto the floors below. 

     At 8:30 a.m., more than four hours after firefighters first arrived, tongues of orange flame shot 10 feet out of one corner of the building, and four aerial towers shot huge streams of water into the building. Dirty water came flooding out the front door. Burning embers soared over the street, and nearby cars were smeared with soot. 

     At times, the smoke on La Salle became so thick that only the emergency lights on the fire trucks, pulsing and strobing and cycling back and forth, could be seen through the blinding brownish-yellow haze. The smoke set off alarms at nearby buildings, where silhouettes of the curious could be seen, watching the blaze from high above. 

      The roofless brick shell of the Paxton Hotel, with its ornate yellow facade and quaint urns rimming the top, did not collapse, however. As the fire was gradually brought under control, firefighters used axes and gaffs to break out the window frames to allow litters to be brought in to carry out the bodies. A police squadrol pulled up close to the front of the hotel, forming a discreet shield with a ladder truck. A policeman began pulling on white rubber gloves. 

      Contributing: Tom Seibel, Dan Lehmann

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times,  March 17, 1993 

We can’t say we haven’t had practice

Sun-Times file photo

     “Queer” used to be a slur. Then gay people took the word back, claiming it their own, as a sort of general term for the whole rainbow-hued subculture in all its freedom and fabulousness.
     My first thought, learning that Chicago has snagged the 2024 Democratic National Convention, was that this is a good way for us to similarly reclaim both the adjective “Democratic” and the noun “Chicago” and make them a little less battered than they have been of late.
     For years Republicans have been trying to turn “Democratic” into an all-purpose insult by chopping off the ending and pretending that the problems facing cities are there because they tend to be run by Democrats, when it’s the other way around: Cities tend to go Democratic because they have problems that need to be addressed, not chuckled over. Thus, Democrats.
     This is a chance for Chicago, the poster child for urban woes, to marry itself once again to the party that for too long has seen its mantle of patriotism and efficiency stripped away, and by those bumbling shambolically toward treason.
     First, a few ground rules. This isn’t our third Democratic National Convention, though that might be the default assumption. It’s our 12th, having been the host in 1864, 1884, 1892, 1896, 1932, 1940, 1944, 1952, 1956, and of course 1968 and 1996.
     That 1932 convention is worth remembering not just because it led to the rare defeat of a sitting president. Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first candidate to show up at a convention to accept the nomination (the habit had been to sit on your front porch and feign indifference), and he did it by arriving in a shiny silver Ford Trimotor, making him the first presidential candidate to fly in an airplane, arriving to promise a “New Deal” for America.
     Otherwise we have the twin bookends of 1968 and 1996 as guides. The first was a catastrophe that hardly needs explaining — masses of shaggy-haired protesters battling police. While the cops rightly get blame for that, the disaster was set in motion by City Hall. In trying to keep protests away from the site of the convention, the International Amphitheater, Richard J. Daley ended up pushing it onto Michigan Avenue. The 1968 convention might have transpired differently had Daley not spread the combustibles that the cops ignited.

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Flashback 2013: "Measure for Measure" delivers jolts

Photo by Liz Lauren/Goodman Theatre

     Robert Falls bids farewell as creative director of the Goodman Theatre with "The Cherry Orchard," which opened Monday night. In honor of this transition, I'm featuring a few columns inspired by his work over the years. I've been marveling his plays since "Hamlet" at Wisdom Bridge in 1986. Many were shocking. But none were more so than his 2013"Measure for Measure." The audience didn't quite riot; but they wanted to.

     If you asked me to start naming Shakespeare plays off the top of my head, I think I would avail myself pretty well.
     There’s “Hamlet,” of course, and “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet” (telling that I would start with the tragedies — I’m a sucker for tragedy).
     What else? The histories — “Richard II,” “Richard III,” “Henry IV” (parts 1 and 2), “Henry V,” “Julius Caesar.” And the comedies — my least favorite category — “As You Like It,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “Taming of the Shrew,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Twelfth Night,” “The Merchant of Venice,” which nobody thinks of as a comedy, anymore, but was originally intended to be.
     And then the obscure plays — “Titus Andronicus” and “Timon of Athens” and such.
     I could probably scrape up a few more, but you get the idea. The point I’m crawling toward is that I’m familiar with Shakespeare, and have seen his plays by the dozens, going back to Cleveland’s Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, up to the American Players Theatre in Wisconsin, to our own underappreciated Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier.

     Yet, despite this familiarity, until a few weeks ago I could have squinched my eyes and listed plays until I turned blue and never gotten to “Measure for Measure.” I hope that doesn’t make you think less of me. Before the Goodman Theatre announced it was putting on the play — it opens this Monday — I never heard about it, never thought about it and even hours before going to a preview Thursday, didn’t have the foggiest what it is about.
     “What is it about?” my wife asked, as we got ready to go, with perhaps a bit of what-am-I-getting-myself-into dread.
     “A bit with a dog and love triumphant,” I guessed, quoting “Shakespeare in Love.”
     Completely wrong.
     Which means I had the benefit of seeing the play as a complete blank slate, expecting nothing, knowing nothing, and in my ideal world you’d set this column down right now and go see it, solely on my recommendation, then finish reading this, the way I at times rush to Hedy Weiss to explain what I’ve seen.
     Not exactly a spoiler alert — I’m not the spoiler sort. But even knowing a shock is coming lessens the shock; you expect it.
     And with this new production, there will be many moments when you think, “So, is THIS the shock that so rattled Steinberg’s windows?” No, it’s not. Patience. It’s coming.
     The shock of what happens onstage was magnified, for me, by the shock that I was shocked at all. I don’t do shock. Shock, like being offended, is for amateurs and the old.
     Besides, we have learned to expect shock in plays directed by Robert Falls. Some consider that a flaw, but I find it invigorating. He peels the velvet glove off the iron fist of sex and horror that pulses through Shakespeare and then jams it, unpadded, into your face.
     Thus Ophelia, hiking up her skirts and rubbing herself in his “Hamlet.” Thus Gloucester’s eyes not only plucked out — as the Bard intended — but ending up sizzling on a restaurant line grill in “King Lear,” the whole thing set in a dissolving Eastern Europe dictatorship, the opening scene spoken by characters standing at urinals, doing their business, their backs to the audience.
     That was tights and ruffs and declaiming “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a bare stage with one hand folded atop another compared to the opening minutes of Falls’ “Measure for Measure,” a Boschian, neon-lit hellscape, half “Taxi Driver,” half Ed Paschke’s early work come to life, a loud, dirty, overwhelming set piece (“Did you see that guy masturbating?” my wife asked, on the drive home. “No,” I said, “I was focusing on the stripper.”)
     Falls always shocks other people — the groundlings, the timid, the life-averse, those whose idea of tragedy is Bambi’s mother dying. Me, I collect Bob Falls shocks the way a lepidopterist collects butterflies — with zeal and appreciation: This is the stuff that upsets others but I find magnificent; a shock, yes, but in a good way, your shirt ripped open, the paddles applied and the tired old heart given a revivifying jolt, part of Falls’ lifelong rescue of Shakespeare from the rolled R crowd, returning it the alive thing it was meant to be.
     But this shock is truly shocking — a lady at the after-play conversation Thursday described it as “grotesque” and I didn’t argue with her. I’m not saying Falls was wrong. He’s right. It took me a while to see it. Not until the next morning, really, when I realized that, as the shock unfolded, my mind formed an alternate narrative — where I thought he was going — that was trite, ordinary and banal.  

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 17, 2013